Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

368 Pages·2012·6.86 MB·English

by  Charles L. Allen

Also by Charles Allen
Plain Tales from the Raj Tales from the Dark Continent Tales from the South
China Seas Raj Scrapbook
The Savage Wars of Peace
Thunder and Lightning
Lives of the Indian Princes A Soldier of the Company
A Glimpse of the Burning Plain Kipling’s Kingdom
A Mountain in Tibet
The Search for Shangri-La The Buddha and the Sahibs Soldier Sahibs
Duel in the Snows
God’s Terrorists
Kipling Sahib
The Buddha and Dr Führer
Copyright
Published by Hachette Digital ISBN: 978-1-408-70388-5
Copyright © Charles Allen 2012
Map copyright © John Gilkes All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men. They are honoured not only by columns and
inscriptions in their own land, but in foreign nations on memorials graven not on stone but in the
hearts and minds of men.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 404 BCE
Contents
Also by Charles Allen
Copyright
Preface: The King Without Sorrow
1 The Breaking of Idols
2 The Golden Column of Firoz Shah
3 Objects of Enquiry
4 Enter Alexander
5 Furious Orientalists
6 The Long Shadow of Horace Hayman Wilson
7 Prinsep’s Ghat
8 Thus Spake King Piyadasi
9 Brian Hodgson’s Gift
10 Records of the Western Regions
11 Alexander Cunningham the Great
12 Sir Alexander in Excelsis
13 Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum
14 India after Cunningham
15 Ashoka in the Twentieth Century
16 The Rise and Fall of Ashokadharma
Acknowledgements
Appendix:The Rock and Pillar Edicts
Notes
Index

Preface
The King Without Sorrow
The emperor listed in the ancient Brahmanical Puranas as Ashoka raja, ‘The
King Without Sorrow’, ruled over a united India some 2250 years ago. In the
course of some forty years Ashoka unified the subcontinent under one
government, transformed a minor religious sect into a world religion and
introduced moral concepts whose impact on Asia can be felt to this day. Ashoka
may be said to be India’s founding father, being the first ruler to forge India into
a single nation state. As if that were not enough, long before Mahatma Gandhi,
Emperor Ashoka espoused non-violence and the utterly novel concept of
conquest by moral force alone – and he was very probably the first ruler in
history to establish a welfare state. Ashoka is also the first in India’s ancient
dynasties of kings with a distinctive, identifiable voice – and no ordinary voice
at that, for what he had to say was and remains absolutely, unequivocally unique
as a statement of governing principles.
The words of what might justifiably be called Ashoka’s Song – more
prosaically referred to as the Ashokan Rock or Pillar Edicts – were inscribed in
India’s first written script, Ashoka Brahmi. They were chiselled on hundreds of
rock surfaces and on scores of polished pillars of stone throughout the Indian
subcontinent, so that his song could be heard loud and clear from Kandahar to
the mouths of the Irrawady and from Cape Cormorin at the tip of southern India
to the Himalayas. From this heartland that same message spread out in ripples on
all sides until it was heard in the furthest corners of Asia.
Only a precious few of these edicts have survived the vicissitudes of time and
human violence in readable form: some seven edict rocks, eleven edict pillars,
another nineteen more modest sites bearing what are usually referred to as the
Minor Rock Edicts and perhaps a dozen more inscriptions in various forms that
can be attributed to Ashoka. Together they constitute the earliest surviving
written records of India’s ancient history. Yet it is a remarkable and little-known
fact that they and the emperor who composed them were all but lost to history
for the better part of two thousand years.
The religious tolerance that Emperor Ashoka called for in his seventh Rock
The religious tolerance that Emperor Ashoka called for in his seventh Rock
Edict (RE 7), where he spoke of his desire ‘that all religions should reside
everywhere’, lay at the heart of the new thinking that Ashoka’s religious
ministers promoted within the borders of his empire and his missionaries
beyond. But even in his own time this message was perceived as a threat by
those who believed that they and they alone had the authority to dictate what
religious codes people should follow.
British historians and archaeologists working in India in the nineteenth
century were quick to blame the eclipse of Buddhism there on the Muslim
conquests. For seven centuries zealots did indeed inflict horrendous human and
cultural damage on India in the name of Islam, yet the fact is that Buddhism in
India was in terminal decline long before Mahmud of Ghazni first crossed the
Indus in the year 1008 CE.* Already by the ninth century Buddhism as practised
by its adherents in India had become so esoteric, so isolated from the wider
community as to be unable to compete with revitalised, devotional Hinduism as
promoted by the ninth-century reformer Adi Shankaracharya and his followers.
However, there is another equally important reason for the failure of Buddhism
in India – one that few followers of the Hindutva nationalist movement (which
believes that the only good Indian is a Hindu Indian) are prepared to accept:
Brahmanical intolerance, which at times was as unbending in its hatred of heresy
and heretics as later Muslim hardliners were in their jihads against unbelief and
unbelievers.
Much of the evidence for this Brahmanical oppression comes from India’s
Buddhist neighbours in Tibet, Nepal, Burma and Ceylon. However, there are
also Brahmanical texts that demonstrate an implacable hostility towards
Buddhists and record their persecution at the hands of orthodox Hindu rulers.
And there is the evidence of archaeology.
The politicians who in 1991 egged on the mob that destroyed Babur’s
mosque at Ayodhya on the grounds that it was built over the Hindu warrior-god
Rama’s fort may be surprised to know that some of the most famous Hindu
temples in India almost certainly began as Buddhist structures, often
incorporating Buddhist icons, either in the form of images of deities or as
lingams. Four likely examples – selected simply because they come from the
four corners of the subcontinent – are the Badrinath shrine in the far north
Garhwal Himal, the Jagannath temple at Puri on the east coast, the Ayyappa
shrine at Sabarimala in Kerala and the Vithalla shrine at Pandharpur in Western
Maharashtra.
The triumph of Brahmanism (the lion) over Buddhism (the elephant), as photographed in 1890. The
giant lion is one of a pair that guard the entrance to the great temple of the sun god Surya, a sublime
example of Hindu architecture in India.1 (APAC, British Library)
However, the most striking evidence of Brahmanical hostility towards
Buddhism comes in the form of silence: the way in which India’s Buddhist
history, extending over large parts of the country and lasting for many centuries,
was excised from the historical record. It was by this simple act of omission –
the historical revisionism of generations of pious Brahman pundits and
genealogists – that Ashoka’s Song was silenced, and Emperor Ashoka himself
all but erased from India’s history. In its call for religious tolerance, its wish that
all living beings should live together in harmony and without violence, Ashoka’s
Song spoke to all. But by promoting the Buddhist heresy throughout the land,
Ashoka directly challenged the caste-based authority of the Brahman order. He
and his beliefs could not be tolerated.
Religious intolerance knows no frontiers. When the Mughal Emperor Shah
Jehan was pulling down Hindu temples in Benares, Puritans in England were
busying themselves smashing medieval stained glass and destroying idols in
churches up and down the country. Historians who deny or conceal such
uncomfortable truths do us no favours. Herein lies part of the reason for writing